All: we have had an increase in troll posts lately. Please avoid engaging them and resist the urge to correct assertions no matter how wrong, indignating, etc. The best response to troll posts is spending the time that would elsewhere go in flamewars, on good work. Feel free to use your newsreader's "killfile" feature to filter away posts from aliases you assess have a net negative contribution to this forum.

Thanks,

Andrei

On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 17:44:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> All: we have had an increase in troll posts lately. Please avoid engaging them and resist the urge to correct assertions no matter how wrong, indignating, etc. The best response to troll posts is spending the time that would elsewhere go in flamewars, on good work. Feel free to use your newsreader's "killfile" feature to filter away posts from aliases you assess have a net negative contribution to this forum.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei

Why doesnt D have two mailing lists, or two forums,
many FOSS projects, have one mailing list open for everyone, trolls and what-not

And another mailing list, that is read-only for everyone, and only the DLang contributors can post to it

Tcl is good example, in general I believe Tcl is one of better managed FOSS projects, their wiki, dev mailing list, TIP/DIP system is one of the best

On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 17:44:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> All: we have had an increase in troll posts lately. Please avoid engaging them and resist the urge to correct assertions no matter how wrong, indignating, etc. The best response to troll posts is spending the time that would elsewhere go in flamewars, on good work. Feel free to use your newsreader's "killfile" feature to filter away posts from aliases you assess have a net negative contribution to this forum.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei

we should switch to a forum software. enough is enough. we can't edit posts, we can't get rid of spammers and trolls. we don't have proper code formatting / syntax highlighting. what is holding you guys back?

On 11/27/17 2:30 PM, Mengu wrote:
> On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 17:44:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> All: we have had an increase in troll posts lately. Please avoid engaging them and resist the urge to correct assertions no matter how wrong, indignating, etc. The best response to troll posts is spending the time that would elsewhere go in flamewars, on good work. Feel free to use your newsreader's "killfile" feature to filter away posts from aliases you assess have a net negative contribution to this forum.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Andrei
> 
> we should switch to a forum software. enough is enough. we can't edit posts, we can't get rid of spammers and trolls. we don't have proper code formatting / syntax highlighting. what is holding you guys back?

We can get rid of spammers and trolls. It just won't happen for those who use the mailing list or NNTP (though to a certain degree, NNTP can remove posts).

But editing posts doesn't work with NNTP. You could potentially "hold back" posts from going to NNTP for a probation period, for those cases where you accidentally hit send, or you immediately see a typo. But once it's on the NNTP server, it's set in stone. I kind of like it that way, anyway. No more revisionist history :)

Syntax highlighting can work just fine, it just will only be on the forum. I think Vladimir would be happy to entertain updates to the forum software:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

-Steve

On Monday, November 27, 2017 19:30:36 Mengu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 17:44:54 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
>
> wrote:
> > All: we have had an increase in troll posts lately. Please avoid engaging them and resist the urge to correct assertions no matter how wrong, indignating, etc. The best response to troll posts is spending the time that would elsewhere go in flamewars, on good work. Feel free to use your newsreader's "killfile" feature to filter away posts from aliases you assess have a net negative contribution to this forum.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andrei
>
> we should switch to a forum software. enough is enough. we can't edit posts, we can't get rid of spammers and trolls. we don't have proper code formatting / syntax highlighting. what is holding you guys back?

I don't use the web interface for the newsgroup, and I have no interest in doing so. I use the mailing list. The same goes for many of the major contributors. Others use the newsgroup directly. IMHO, being stuck with any form of forum software would be worse than being able to use my e-mail client like I do now. Sure, editing posts would occasionally be nice, but it rarely matters much, and I've never seen the lack of formatting or syntax highlighting as being much of a problem. Plain text generally works for the sort of communication that we have here - certainly it's not enough of a problem for me to want to deal with forum software instead of a proper mailing list.

Historically, spammers and trolls have only occasionally been a problem, and outright spam does usually get removed from the newsgroup. We have unfortunately had some major problems with a few recent threads where there have been quite a few troll posts in them. So, it makes sense for Walter and/or Andrei to speak up about it, but I expect that the problem will pass. It always has before. If we follow Andrei's advice and do better at ignoring the troll posts, it will blow over soon enough. And most of us don't really want to have to have anyone around here spending their time moderating. We spend too much of our time in useless chatter as it is instead of creating or reviewing PRs.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 11/27/2017 11:57 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> I don't use the web interface for the newsgroup, and I have no interest in
> doing so. I use the mailing list. The same goes for many of the major
> contributors. Others use the newsgroup directly. IMHO, being stuck with any
> form of forum software would be worse than being able to use my e-mail
> client like I do now. Sure, editing posts would occasionally be nice, but it
> rarely matters much, and I've never seen the lack of formatting or syntax
> highlighting as being much of a problem. Plain text generally works for the
> sort of communication that we have here - certainly it's not enough of a
> problem for me to want to deal with forum software instead of a proper
> mailing list.

Another advantage to our method is the "database" is just a pile of text files. There is no need for any program to decode it other than "cat". Also, the text files can be processed for display in any number of ways, such as:

  http://forum.dlang.org/group/general

or even:

  http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html